Collected Poems (5 page)

to float in brothers and sisters I’ll need

your engines and computers I’ll need four tall buildings

and heaters and strong-bulldozers with

thick treads and switches and there must be

uniforms

there must be maps and hoses and

tiled rooms to drain the blood off

and will your voices

come telling me you love me? and your mouths

and hands? and your cold

music? every inch of me? every

hour of me?

After That

Do you know how much pain is left

in the world? One tiny bit of pain is left,

braised on one cell like a toothmark.

And how many sorrows there still are? Three sorrows:

the last, the next to the last and this one.

And there is one promise left, feeling

its way through the poison, and one house

and one gun and one shout of agony

that wanders in the lost cities and the lost mountains.

And so this morning, suffering the third sorrow

from the last, feeling pain in my last gene,

cracks in the struts, bubbles in the nitro,

this morning for someone I’m not even sure exists

I waste tears. I count down by fractions

through the ash. I howl. I use everything up.

Ten Below

It is bad enough crying for children

suffering neglect and starvation in our world

without having on a day like this

to see an old cart horse covered with foam,

quivering so hard that when he stops

the wheels still rock slowly in place

like gears in an engine.

A man will do that, shiver where he stands,

frozen with false starts,

just staring,

but with a man you can take his arm,

talk him out of it, lead him away.

What do you do when both hands

and your voice are simply goads?

When the eyes you solace see space,

the wall behind you, the wisp of grass

pushing up through the curb at your feet?

I have thought that all the animals

we kill and maim, if they wanted to

could stare us down, wither us

and turn us to smoke with their glances —

they forbear because they pity us,

like angels, and love of something else

is why they suffer us and submit.

But this is Pine Street, Philadelphia, 1965.

You don’t believe

in anything divine being here.

There is an old plug with a worn blanket

thrown on its haunches. There is a wagon

full of junk — pipes and rotted sinks,

the grates from furnaces — and there

is a child walking beside the horse

with sugar, and the mammoth head lowering,

delicately nibbling from those vulnerable

fingers. You can’t cut your heart out.

Sometimes, just what is, is enough.

Tails

there was this lady once she used to grow

snakes in her lap

they came up like tulips

from her underpants and the tops

of her stockings and she’d get us

with candy and have us pet

the damned things

god they were horrible skinned

snakes all dead

it turned out she’d catch

them in the garden and skin

them and drive

knitting needles up along the spines

and sew them on

it stank

the skins rotting in the corner heads

scattered all over the floor

it turned out she loved

children she wanted

to do something

for us we ate

the candy of course we touched

the snakes we

hung around god

we hated her she was

terrible

Sky, Water

for Bruce and Fox McGrew

They can be fists punching the water —

muskrats, their whole bodies plunging

through weak reeds from the bank,

or the heads of black and white ducks

that usually flicker in quietly

and come up pointing heavenwards.

A man can lie off the brown scum of a slough

and watch how they’ll go in like blades,

deeply, to the bottom,

and in his pale silence

with the long field furrows strumming

like distant music,

he will wonder at and pity

the creatures hooked together like flowers on the water,

who will die flashing in the air,

shaken in the beak of sunlight.

The surface tainted with small blood,

there can be bees and water hydra,

sea-grasses and blown seed,

and before a man’s eyes life and death,

silence and the dim scream of love

can rise and furl up

from the bottom like smoke

and thin away.

Downwards

This is the last day of the world. On the river docks

I watch for the last time the tide get higher

and chop in under the stinking pilings. How the small creatures

who drift dreaming of hands and lungs must sting,

rotting alive in the waste spill, coming up dead

with puffy stomachs paler than the sky or faces.

There is deep fire fuming ash to the surface.

It is the last tide and the last evening and from now

things will strive back downwards.

A fish thrown up will gasp in the flare

and flop back hopelessly through the mud flats to the water.

The last man, an empty bottle with no message, is here, is me,

and I am rolling, fragile as a bubble in the upstream spin,

battered by carcasses, drawn down by the lips of weeds

to the terrible womb of torn tires and children’s plastic shoes

and pennies and urine. I am no more, and what is left,

baled softly with wire, floating

like a dark pillow in the hold of the brown ship, is nothing.

It dreams. Touching fangs delicately with cranes

and forklifts, it rests silently in its heavy ripening.

It stands still on the water, rocking, blinking.

Shells

It’s horrible, being run over by a bus

when all you are is a little box turtle.

You burst. Your head blasts out like a cork

and soars miles

to where the boy sprawls on the grass strip

beside the sidewalk. In mid-air

you are him. Your face touches his face,

you stutter, and you will go all your life

holding your breath,

wondering what you meant.

                                                  He forgets now

but he knew it in his cheek scorched

by the sweet blades and in his wild groin.

In his mother’s arms, screaming,

he knew it: that he was crossing

under the laughter and there was the other voice

sobbing, It’s not far, It’s not far.

Beyond

Some people,

they just don’t hate enough yet.

They back up, snarl, grab guns

but they’re like children,

they overreach themselves;

they end up standing there feeling stupid,

wondering if it’s worth it.

Some people, they don’t have a cause yet.

They just throw their hate here and there

and sooner or later it’s hollow

and they say, What is this?

and after that it’s too late.

After that you can barely

button your sleeve in the morning —

you just take breaths.

Some people are too tired to hate

and so they think, Why live?

They read the papers, wince,

but they’re hardly there anymore.

You go by them in the street

and they don’t spit or mutter —

they look at themselves in store windows,

they touch their faces.

Some people, you give up

on them. You let them go,

you lose them.

They were like children, they hardly

knew what they meant. You think to yourself,

Good Riddance.

Patience Is When You Stop Waiting

I stand on the first step under the torn mouths of hours

in a new suit. Terrified of the arched webs and the dust,

of my speech, my own hair slicked with its thin pride,

I jut like a thorn; I turn, my pain turns and closes.

Tell me again about silence. Tell me I won’t,

not ever, hear the cold men whispering in my pores

or the mothers and fathers who scream in the bedroom

and throw boxes of money between them and kiss.

At the window, faces hover against the soft glow

like names. If I cry out, it will forget me and go;

if I don’t, nothing begins again. Tell me

about mercy again, how she rides in eternity’s arms

in the drifts and the dreams come. The night is dying.

Wisely it thinks of death as a thing born of desire.

Gently it opens its sharp ribs and bites through

and holds me. Tell me about my life again, where it is now.

Faint Praise

for Jim Moss, 1935–1961

Whatever last slump of flesh

rolls like a tongue in the mouth of your grave,

whatever thin rags of your underwear

are melting in slow, tiny stomachs,

I am still here; I have survived.

I thought when you died that your angels,

stern, dangerous bats with cameras and laws,

would swarm like bees

and that the silences flaming from you

would fuse me like stone.

There were no new landscapes I could prepare for you.

I let you go.

And tonight, again, I will eat, read,

and my wife and I will move into love

in the swells of each other like ships.

The loose aerial outside will snap,

the traffic lights blink and change,

the dried lives of autumn crackle like cellophane.

And I will have my life still.

In the darkness, it will lie over against me,

it will whisper, and somehow,

after everything, open to me again.

Halves

I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces

because there is something in me that is neither

the right half nor the left half nor between them.

It is what I see when I close my eyes, and what I see.

As in this room there is something neither ceiling

nor floor, not space, light, heat or even

the deep skies of pictures, but something that beats softly

against others when they’re here and others not here,

that leans on me like a woman,

curls up in my lap and walks

with me to the kitchen or out of the house altogether

to the street — I don’t feel it, but it beats and beats;

so my life: there is this, neither before me

nor after, not up, down, backwards nor forwards from me.

It is like the dense, sensory petals in a breast

that sway and touch back. It is like the mouth of a season,

the cool speculations bricks murmur, the shriek in orange,

and though it is neither true nor false, it tells me

that it is quietly here, and, like a creature, is in pain;

that when I ripen it will crack open the locks, it will love me.

Penance

I only regret the days wasted in no pain.

I am sorry for having touched bottom

and loved again.

I am sorry for the torn sidewalks

and the ecstasy underneath, for the cars,

the old flower-lady watching her fingers,

my one shoe in the morning

with death on its tongue.

In the next yard a dog whines

and whines for his lost master

and for the children who have gone

without him. I am sorry

because his teeth click on my neck,

because my chest shudders and the owl cries

in the tug of its fierce sacrament.

I repent God and children,

the white talons of peace and my jubilance.

Everything wheels

in the iron rain, smiling and lying.

Forgive me, please.

It Is Teeming

In rain like this what you want is an open barn door

to look out from. You want to see the deep hoofprints

in the yard fill and overflow, to smell the hay and hear

the stock chewing and stamping and their droppings pattering.

Of course the messengers would come away. A wet mutt,

his underlip still crisp with last night’s chicken blood,

will drift through the gate and whine and nuzzle

your knee with a bad look like a secret drinker,

and you will wish for the lions, the claws that erected

and slashed back, because you are tired of lording it,

of caving ribs in, of swinging axes and firing.

Where are the angels with trucks who pulled the trees down?

Now it is pure muck, half cowshit, half mud and blood, seething.

You have to go out back, dragging it, of course. No one

sees you with it. The rain — you throw wakes up like a giant.

The way you wanted it, the way it would be, of course.

From Now On

for Murray Dessner

this knowledge so innocently it goes this sin

it dies without looking back it ripens

and dissolves and behind it behind

january behind bread and trenches there

are rooms with no gods in them there are breasts

with no deaths anymore and no promises

I knew mercy would leave me and turn

back I knew things in their small nests would

want me and say Come and things blossoming

say Go Downwards but still am I no bigger

than one man? not a pint more? a

watt? a filament of pity or sweetness? I turn

over first one side heads and then tails

I love life first then death first I

close I open I split down like an amoeba

into bricks and sunrise and longing